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Comment by Avamander | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned the same problem in one other subthread as well. Current hardware is certainly performant enough not to become this sluggish at just 100 000 or so emails. There's actually no reason it shouldn't work well with say a million emails in one inbox.

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I haven't used Thunderbird in a long time, but regularly used Outlook with multi-gigabye .pst files. Surely sqlite on an SSD would be up to the task of handling at least million emails of average size.

> Outlook with multi-gigabye .pst files

What has been your experience? Mine in trying to use and support it is that Outlook is an Exchange client; PSTs are hacks to meet demand, though they work well enough in limited circumstances. Especially PSTs over a LAN connection are a disaster.

The Exchange server hardware was so underpowered (or the software so ill-designed for large mailboxes) that Exchange powered searches would fail, but ones run on the local pst would complete successfully (if slowly). This was on an HDD. SSD would be much faster.

> This was on an HDD. SSD would be much faster.

OT but is that right? SSDs have many advantages but sequential read isn't necessarily one of them. SSDs seek is much faster, but this is ~one file. Throughput can be much faster due to the better interfaces, but is throughput the bottleneck for this kind of search?

Good question. Property benchmarking would be required to know for sure. It's probably rare that a multi-gigabyte file would be contiguous on disk, so lots of seeking would probably be required anyway.

SSDs are usually better at sequential read as well as seeks. Depending on how outlook organizes the file (and how it gets organized in the file system) there's probably a mix of seeking and sequential reads anyway.

Apple Mail.app is 10x better and right there.

I'm primarily a Linux user, but Mail.app is probably the best graphical email client I've ever had the pleasure of using (you can pry mutt from my cold, dead hands).

Yes, I know it's also an GNUStep application

I did an internship in IT 20 years ago where we were building/maintaining desktops and other general helpdesk type stuff. I'm pretty sure I remember us having a handful of users with multi-gig pst files, running on 2005 hardware.

Tell that to apple mail. Makes no sense how an app seemingly unchanged since the tiger days when I started using it could still be as performant as it always was on far better hardware. In fact I frequently find it to be the culprit when I wonder what the hell could be spinning my fans on this m3 pro just churning over the database.

Iphone version is arguably worse because it also has performance issues but doesn’t support inbox rules. Then again those inbox rules often fail to filter emails anyhow.

I just checked mine and I have about 250k emails sitting in my personal laptop's mailbox, no issues there. It might be dependent on the provider - I know at work where we use Exchange I get occasional slowdowns but I'm not sure whether that's due to Mail.app, due to Exchange, due to our dear endpoint security software taking its sweet time checking whatever I'm doing, or any combination of these. I probably have a couple million emails in my work laptop's mailbox though. Often the "Rebuild Mailbox" function fixes any problems for me, at least for a while.

The iPhone one regularly just doesn't search properly for me though. I'll search for the exact subject or contents of a message and just won't be able to find it, then when I go to my laptop and type in the exact same terms it finds it instantly.

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